Gitsy's Treasure Quests: Crafting a Toy Wreath

I get the call from my craftiest friend, KATE: "Get your glue gun and come on over!" AND IT WAS ON! While I am all about dreaming up crafts and storing and saving supplies to make crafts, Kate is about DOING CRAFTS! This girl dives in head first while I tentatively test the water with my big toe.

So I accept the challenge, grab my glue gun and cheap plastic toys and head over to her house. We sit on the deck on a sunny Sunday, sipping iced tea and eating homemade kettle corn. We plug in our hot glue guns and off we go!

I saw Kate at the "Barn of Opportunity", our recycling center, a few days ago and she plugged her craft idea. In the two minutes before it closed, we grabbed a couple handfuls of toys from the free toy bin. Later, we supplemented our inventory with toys from the four kids between us. In about 1.5 hours, VOILA!!! A novelty toy wreath!

I can't believe how fun and how easy this project turned out to be. Kate, who has an artist's eye, made sure we didn't put two penguins next to each other, and kept an eye on the overall form - making sure it didn't look lopsided, without any obvious gaps. But overall, you really can't go wrong as long as you have lots of little toys and lots of glue!

Digging through the toy bins had an unexpected side effect. Our kids rediscovered the toys that had long been lying dormant!!! Kate's son ended up building a complicated dump truck with his long forgotten K-Nex toys. And her daughter asked to set up the doll house and revisit Polly Pocket and friends.

One of my sons recognized some of his toy box cultch already attached to the wreath and expressed (half joking) that I was "stealing his childhood". After he identified the items in the wreath that previously belonged to him, he grabbed a couple "keepers" and walked away. Kate's daughter also requested a give-back, so we had to pry it off the wreath and fill that space with another treasure.

This craft idea could actually be a positive experience for your child by getting their prior approval to make them a customized keepsake of their childhood toys that might otherwise end up broken and in the trash.